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CV

Chris Drange’s large-format portraits are representative of post-digital pop art. He confronts the medium of painting with likenesses taken from social media, in order to visualize identity-endowing options from Internet networks. His works are not only rooted in pop art, however; they reflect the venerable tradition of court painting, since Drange’s subjects are also glamourous people, “celebrities” in the digital world, depicted in photo(shop) realistic style on canvas.

Filtering his “models” out of various Internet networks, the artist processes the selfies he finds on the computer, adding selected emojis, for example. The data is then enlarged to their final dimensions at a machine learning company in Lithuania. Finally, the portraits are painted on canvas at an oil painting factory in China. One previous practitioner of this kind of painting strategy is Martin Kippenberger, who had a poster painter execute the paintings in his 1981 series Dear Painter, Please Paint Me.

Drange, however, is interested in more than the issues of authorship and the artist’s signature. He gives digital images a material reality: the selfies transposed to canvas are wrested from the intangible river of data and exist as pictorial readymades. In this way they become nearly kitschy allegories of beauty and youth, death and mortality, standing in the tradition of “classic” portrait painting.

It is precisely this moment of kitsch that is significant, because it is characterized by what Theodor W. Adorno called an “inherent moment of fulfillment” and “freedom.” This moment of happiness allows Drange to say something about the emotional content of the social media world that can generally be understood. To do so, he abandons the strategy of critique, without turning to affirmation. Instead, his concept of “being understood” allows for a type of reception that perceives and comprehends and is thus similar to pop art and its use of over-affirmation.

Selfies are initiated by self-identification, which results in the presentation of the self in media, thus motivating others to identify, as well. This effect, which opens up the option for Drange’s paintings to be a kind of art for everyone, is also reflected in his book Relics (2017). In the book selfies of famous Instagrammers are accompanied by the comments and selfies of their “followers.” The contrast makes it clear that the identification that occurs here is not simply “blind loyalty,” but of the kind that results in their followers actively presenting themselves, too.